Peter Mathias

Duration: 1 hour 25 mins 50 secs
Peter Mathias's image
Description: An interview with Peter Mathias, the economic historian and sometime Master of Downing College, Cambridge. Interviewed and filmed by Alan Macfarlane on 4 September 2008 and edited by Sarah Harrison. Generously supported by the Leverhulme Trust.
 
Created: 2011-04-08 09:14
Collection: Film Interviews with Leading Thinkers
Publisher: University of Cambridge
Copyright: Professor Alan Macfarlane
Language: eng (English)
Keywords: economic historian;
Credits:
Actor:  Peter Mathias
Director:  Alan Macfarlane
Reporter:  Sarah Harrison
Transcript:
0:09:07 Born 1928 in Freshford, Somerset; father in the Navy and did not see him until over two years old; mother had gone back to live with her parents for my birth; father was a Petty Officer Writer then and was on a goodwill visit to the east coast of the United States on HMS Capetown; when he returned in 1930 my mother rented a flat in Plymouth, close to Devonport where he was based; he was retired in 1932 aged forty in the worst year of the slump; Plymouth was a small town and the closest he could find a job was in Bristol; he became a clerk in the Bristol and West Building Society where we moved; I went to Bishop Road Elementary School; my father had been transferred to the Naval Reserve and was called up again after Munich in 1938; I had just won a scholarship to Colston's Hospital, a local charity school and at that time a direct grant grammar school; this was at no charge to my parents, so made a big difference; I went off to school in 1938 when my father left; my mother did not want to live alone so she went back to live with her parents again for the duration of the War, until 1946; I was boarding at school and spent the holidays with her

4:41:01 It was surprising that my mother and father ever met because my mother was the sixth child of a family of nine living in a small village, Wingfield [near Trowbridge, Wiltshire]; I am much involved at present, arranging to have a plaque to my parents put in the churchyard there; she was the daughter of a family of long-standing, living in Wingfield for at least four generations, called Love, and they lived appropriately in Loves Lane as it is still called; they were servants in Wingfield House; my great-grandfather was coachman; when the head of the family became a County Court Judge my grandfather became Court Usher, the personal servant of the Judge, as well as a court official arranging things when the Judge was on Circuit; of his nine children, they all reached maturity but not all lived that long, two boys and a girl died of TB, thought to be milk related; I identified with Wingfield and the Love family very much more than with my father's family; he had been brought up a Catholic as of Irish Catholic descent; his mother kept a boarding house for seamen opposite the Royal Marine Barracks in Plymouth; my father was never within the faith in a dedicated sense; he met my mother when there was a Navy Day in Weymouth and he showed parties around his warship; my father was absorbed into my mother's family, and they were traditional village Anglicans; grandfather was a pillar of the village and churchwarden; father had travelled extensively and had an interest in Eastern religions; my mother was faithful to the Anglican faith; the family had their own burial plot in the churchyard

11:12:15 Colston's was an Anglican school with chapel every morning, prayers every evening and church on Sunday; it had all the disadvantages of the English Public School tradition with few of the advantages; I was never able to tell to what extent the inadequacies of the school were based on wartime emergencies or just long-standing tradition; it was a very poor school, both financially and in other ways too; it was a good teaching organization up to matriculation but after that it was not a serious educational establishment, and more particularly so in wartime; for a year there was no one teaching history in the sixth form and I had to go for an hour a week to Bristol Grammar School for a tutorial; I was interested in history, although my results were equally good for the sciences; I spent an inordinate length of time in the sixth form as there was nothing else to do until one was called up at eighteen; in December 1945 I came to take a scholarship here, at King's, which I failed to get; I was advised by Christopher Morris at my interview in King's that I should try for Jesus College; I tried again at Easter and got an Exhibition at Jesus; stayed on at school until I was called up in Summer 1946; as was common then, Jesus demanded that those coming up from school should have done military service before they arrived; I spent two years in the army as a conscript before coming up; my father was away from 1938 to 1946 and when he was demobilized he returned to the Bristol and West Building Society; meanwhile he had become a Warrant Officer Writer; he was too old for sea service in World War II and was at various shore stations, known in the Navy as stone frigates; my mother and I would spend part of each holiday following him around the country; he was first in Devonport but then went to one of the greatest Naval Bases of the War, HMS Lucifer in Swansea which came under the authority of an even greater Naval Base, Rear Admiral Cardiff; their remit was to sweep the Bristol Channel of magnetic mines; he then went to Western Approaches Command, Liverpool in 1942 and was there for the rest of the War; after the defeat of Germany he spent a few winter months 1945-46 in Germany, in Kiel and Hamburg particularly, with a party collecting documentation of the Battle of the Atlantic campaign from the U-Boat side; it was then sent to the Admiralty and is now in the National Archives; it was a terrible winter to be travelling round Europe and he caught tuberculosis and was never the same again; he died in 1960

20:03:03 As a conscript, after preliminary training I had opted to join the Intelligence Corp; we did all the initial training and then in 1947 the Control Commission took over in Germany from the military establishment and there were several hundred Intelligence Corps officers who were suddenly without a job; they came back to Aldershot and those of us who were in training were told to get out; the softest option was to transfer to the Army Educational Corps which I did; I was about to go to Germany in September 1948 but my release came through just in time for me to go to Cambridge for the October term; at school I had been interested in everything; I was head prefect, junior head of the Corp, captain of rugby, cricket etc.; music was the biggest absence all the way through; I laboured at piano lessons before boarding school but there was no continuity, so without any regrets at the time, but a pity in retrospect; I do listen to music and go to concerts regularly; we have a minute place in Norfolk and every parish church on the north coast has a music festival in the Summer and we are regular attenders at the Burnham Market Festival; I have always been fond of the Baroque composers, Scarlatti in particular; I do not write to music, and prefer silence; I can only write in longhand, correcting as I go; once done, someone else types it; my technical evolution stopped in the early 1950's, also I had the deadly asset of a secretary

28:25:16 In Jesus, my main mentor was Charles Wilson because I identified with him and his work as an economic historian; by that time I was really committed to economic history within the syllabus; Vivien Fisher was my tutor who was a mediaeval historian; he had one boss eye and could fix you with it which was highly intimidating; I was interested in rowing although there was none at Colston's, but my father was interested and we used to row quite at lot in the holidays; I came up eager to join the boat club in Jesus; met Fisher a couple of days after joining and he told me to resign immediately as no Exhibitioner at Jesus could join the boat club; I was young and obedient and did what he asked, though wish that I had not; in the Faculty, I ran through the tripos in the standard way; the person whom I identified with in the Faculty was Edward Welbourne, who was then Senior Tutor of Emmanuel; he later became Master; he had been at Market Rasen Grammar School where Charles Wilson had also been a pupil; they were devoted allies; Wilson told me to go to Welbourne's lectures which I duly did; his lectures were whatever came into his mind though under the heading of “some technological factors in English economic history”; he was a Johnsonian figure; he wrote almost nothing except a little book on the Northumberland and Durham miners; however, he read voraciously, [was the scourge of the Fabians] and had an extraordinary memory; he had a small but devoted band of undergraduates, but he was written off as a clown by the History Faculty; I was also lectured by John Saltmarsh and Christopher Morris; in 1955 when I became an Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty I inherited the second half of John Saltmarsh's lecture course; Sir John Clapham, when he was Professor, lectured on the whole of British economic history; when he died, no one could do the whole thing; it was taken over by John Saltmarsh doing the first half and Charles Wilson, the second half, the break coming in the seventeenth century; as soon as I was appointed Wilson decided to move on; it was the middle of the summer and Wilson said that I should give them in the Michaelmas Term; I never worked so hard in my life to try and keep up; I remember going to Saltmarsh's rooms so he could instruct me on where he stopped and where I had to begin; I knocked on the door and a high-pitched voice told me to come in; he was sitting on top of a very tall step-ladder; his dining table had been fully extended and was full of little bits of paper; he was Vice Provost and was planning the seating of a King's feast; as an undergraduate I went to Christopher Morris's lecture on the history of political thought in my second year; he was a good lecturer who could link the topics to current politics; I also went to Frank Salter's lectures on English economic history; I went to Postan's lectures and subsequently had a great deal to do with him when I became an Assistant Lecturer; when I was an undergraduate, Charles Wilson had fallen out with Postan whom he thought was a jumped-up refugee and too clever by half; he tried to deter me from going to Postan's lectures; I did go but concealed it from Wilson; they subsequently were reconciled

41:06:01 Jesus was an isolated College away from the main line of Cambridge colleges; it existed in rural conservatism in its own grounds and was more inward looking than many other colleges; it had its own very specific Anglican tradition; I understood it perfectly well from Wingfield; I used to go to the Chapel; although I think that technically chapel was not compulsory it was assumed by most of the undergraduates that it was, and by the Scholars and Exhibitioners in particular; Gardner-Smith who was the great orthodox Dean of Chapel, a highly conservative figure about whom there are innumerable stories, quite illegally in 1948 would get the Head Porter to note all those who were in Chapel so he'd know who had been there, and, even more, who had not; I was in the choir then; I would describe myself as a traditional Anglican, though not as devout as my wife

44:00:10 I did not do a doctorate as I was in the generation before it was either mandatory, or, indeed, advantageous; I now wish I had done; my absence of a doctorate is concealed as I now have a higher doctorate; having got a Research Fellowship at Jesus in the Autumn of 1952, Charles Wilson said, having got my knees under a high table, I should resign from the register of graduate students; I obeyed him, but wish I hadn't now; I had already started on research on the brewing industry in the eighteenth century after I graduated in 1951; it was not recognised as an appropriate academic subject at that time; the reputation of the industry was totally polarised between those people, probably from brewing families or connected with the industry directly, and those people who viewed it as the incarnation of the Devil; when I told people what I was working on there would either be silence or people would find it amusing; the advantage was that there had been no serious academic historical work at all [The Loves had second cousins, the Fussells, who owned a small brewery in Rode, a few miles away from Wingfield. The Fussells gave me useful introductions]; that was doubly fortunate as at that time all the brewing firms were still owned by the family, if not run by it; family firms tend not to throw away their records and I found eighteenth century records in every major brewery in London; one of the possible advantages of not tailoring the research to the terms of a doctoral thesis was that I had time; I was able to get an Assistant Lectureship in 1955 which gave me continuity of employment because my Research Fellowship had run out then; I was not under any pressure to publish and I did not do so until 1959; by then the book was too long to read and too expensive for anyone to buy; however, it stood me in good stead as a launching pad for an academic career

49:20:04 Brian Harrison came over from Oxford to be supervised by me; Alan Barker, the only historian in Queens, resigned in 1955; Queens elected me and I was expected then to organize the whole of their teaching, and do quite a lot of it myself, from the Michaelmas Term; at the same time I was doing Charles Wilson's lectures; I was not married then and that made all the difference; I was at Queens from 1955 until 1968 and it was during that time that Brian Harrison came over; he was tremendously hard-working, knew exactly what he wanted to do and how he was going to do it, and was only looking for a very occasional piece of advice from a supervisor; in 1951 after I graduated I joined T.S. Ashton's seminar at the LSE and went every week to the Institute of Historical Research where he ran it; I met Donald Coleman and Jack Fisher, and all the LSE historians there; T.S. Ashton was extremely kind to me and I learnt a great deal from him in 1951-52; Donald was a tiger when he was at LSE, quite unforgiving, knew exactly what he believed in and what he was hostile to; he was able to end a friendship more abruptly than many of the other people I have known; clearly he had a very powerful brain; he ran an informal group and we used to meet in his flat in the Charring Cross Road about twice a term; he would always cook the supper and we would supply the wine; that was very enlightening, particularly coming from Cambridge into the big world of the LSE and the London colleges; I have never been a fellow member of a faculty with him; I did meet R.H. Tawney in 1950; I should say that when I came up to Cambridge I had one supporter, Teddy Rich, who was then Master of St Catharine's; by chance he had been a pupil at Colston's, one of the very few to reach Cambridge, and his younger brother was the gym and German master at Colston's until he was called up; Ivor Rich told Teddy that I had got a scholarship and Teddy Rich welcomed me and invited me to tea when I got to Cambridge; in 1950 Teddy Rich was treasurer of the Economic History Society and he told me I should join although undergraduates did not do so; he invited me to the next conference which was at Worcester; to my surprise we started driving to Oxford and I thought this was not the way to Worcester; of course, it was at Worcester College; I was an innocent abroad in those days, with very limited horizons; Tawney was at the conference; he made an immense impression; he was very kind to me; as President of the Society, he took the chair; on this occasion, Tawney did not set himself on fire but someone was lighting a pipe and a spark went into a matchbox and an acrid smell drifted out; Tawney always went to sleep and when the puff of smoke reached him he woke up, gently stopped the speaker, and asked if somebody was burning prematurely; I never knew Eileen Power as she died in 1940 but learnt a lot about her from Postan and Cynthia; got to know Postan quite well from 1955 when everything happened to me except marriage, including becoming Assistant Editor of the 'Economic History Review' of which Postan was the Editor; he was then in the process of initiating the International Economic History Society with Braudel, and I became the informal secretary of the association and Kenneth Berrill, then professor here, became the informal treasurer of the incipient society

1:03:26:13 During the academic year 1952-53 I went to Harvard and M.I.T.; Charles Wilson thought I should learn some economics which had not been possible within the history tripos; that was the only time that I left Cambridge, apart from sabbatical leave, until 1968 when I went to Oxford; I was in Oxford for twenty years; I succeeded Habakkuk who had been appointed Master of Jesus, Oxford; this meant that he could not hold the Chair and resigned; I applied for the Chair; David Joslin took Postan's Chair when he retired; he was two years older than I was and that meant the Cambridge Chair was blocked for me; when Habakkuk vacated the Chair in Oxford I was induced to apply; ironically, within a year David Joslin had a heart attack and died; all our friends and colleagues were in Cambridge and encouraged me to return; it was an attractive supposition but the more I thought about it the more impossible it became; I had just taken up the Chair, the children were at school, and we had bought a house; Postan was even sent to try and persuade me to apply; I was acutely aware that I would look a fool in both towns if I applied for the Cambridge chair and I was not appointed; I did stay in Oxford for twenty years; was a Fellow of All Souls which had funded the Chichele chair in 1931; they had offered it to Tawney at that time but he declined to leave London; W.G. Hoskins was a Fellow of All Souls at that time but seldom appeared as he was reluctant to leave Exeter; Habakkuk was the person whom I saw most

1:10:03:08 Consider that my more important work centred on the general issues of industrialization; almost all my work has been based upon British primary sources, but it would be the process of industrialization more generally and in a comparative sense in the European context; also in business history - I wrote a history of all the multiple retailing companies which came together when Unilever was formed in 1931; each of the production companies had acquired a trail of dependant and wholly owned retailing companies; a lynch pin of the business was margarine which had induced very large scale organisations in production; as it was a perishable commodity, to ensure quality and to capture downstream profits, they all integrated forwards to control their own retailing outlets; when Unilever was formed, which was essentially an amalgamation of the production companies, there was this trail of retailers which had been brought in their wake; they were amalgamated and grouped as a holding company called Allied Suppliers; Charles Wilson was then finishing his influential business history of Unilever; I had then finished the work on brewing, which was yet to be published; Charles persuaded me to write the history of the retailing companies formed under the umbrella of Unilever which I did; it was published by Longmans in 1967; they had wanted to call it 'Counter Revolution' but were persuaded by the marketing people that it would bemuse potential readers; this work gave me an entree into business history and I have been interested in it since then

1:14:49:03 From the late 1950s when the international association was formed I began to have an international horizon; I became the British representative on the junta at the International Institute in Prato which was then getting into its stride; I had an annual commitment there and met a lot of the Italian economic historians; through one of them, Luigi de Rosa from Naples, an academically powerful man, I acquired various commitments, one of which has been the 'Journal of European Economic History' founded by Luigi in 1971; I am not technically a member of the editorial board but nothing much happened that I did not know about; it is published by the Bank of Rome; also Luigi was a determinant economic historian in the Italian Institute of Philosophical Studies in Naples; for the last ten years I have been giving a course of lectures every year there; Luigi died three years ago but his commitments lived on after him and they have wanted me to continue; this is a different commitment every year and they have a general theme of the Institute which I try to fit in with; they have published two little books of the lectures and there are two more in the press in Naples; that has been an attractive commitment for me and I owe much to Luigi which I am happy to try to repay

1:19:56:22 I have never done any research using Japanese data I went to international meetings there and had three or four Japanese scholars who were sent by their professors to take doctorates in Oxford; thus I became known to Japanese economic historians and that link continues; also when the present Crown Prince came to Oxford I became his research supervisor; he had bucked the trend of the family as his father etc. were all marine biologists, but he was an economic historian; when his family and the Imperial Household Agency wanted him to spend two years in the West, Britain was chosen; I had been much involved with one of his senior academic advisors in Japan so he came to Oxford in 1983 for two years; that commitment has continued and I shall see him again in November; that was one link that consolidated my nexus with Japan and meant very much more than I had realized it would; when I came to Downing College in 1987 I found that there was a link with Keio University and that has consolidated; [Keio gave me an honorary degree in November. My main continuing commitment with Japan is as President of the Great Britain - Sasakawa Foundation whose remit is promoting links between this country and Japan.]

Second Part - 23rd September 2009

0:05:07 I came back to Cambridge in 1987, partly because I was getting rather disenchanted with life in the faculty in Oxford; I enjoyed the college side of life in Oxford; All Souls had funded the Chichele Professorship of Economic History in 1931 and a Professorial Fellowship went with the Chair; if you were a professor in one of the poorer undergraduate colleges it was fairly bleak as you were unlikely to be offered rooms in the college; All Souls was very comfortable for fellows; I met Hugh Lloyd Jones who had been a lecturer in Classics here and had later become Regius Professor of Greek in Oxford; he indicated that to be a college tutor in Oxford was fine, but to be a professor meant that you were outside the heart of the faculty; he claimed that, for non-laboratory subjects in Oxford the faculties were just liaison committees of the college tutors and that: “Tutors, English, good; Professors, German, bad”; it is not quite like that now in Oxford; that was one of the reasons for my leaving Oxford, but the other was an invitation to be a candidate for the Mastership of Downing; I never discovered then or since how that came about; I had no connection with Downing at all; it was a poor college and knew that they would have to pay me a living wage so could have selected a retired diplomat or a Cambridge professor who would prove less expensive; the offer when it came was very attractive; we still had quite a lot of friends in Cambridge, also the Master's Lodge in Downing is a very handsome residence and not too large to be oppressive, with a two acre garden attached; Ann, my wife, has a long-standing interest in gardening so was happy to come to the Lodge; the one disappointment was that I had no operational link with the faculty, I was a formal member but completely on the outside; without a faculty job one didn't know what was going on, and in Cambridge the faculty is the centre of things as far as historical activity is concerned; I was welcomed at the Modern Economic History seminar which I organized with the Professor of Economic History for some years; I was not invited to supervise any graduate students, however, the balance was in favour of accepting and I have never regretted doing so; Downing looked after us very well; it was difficult in many ways succeeding John Butterfield who was a charismatic person, central on the scene, both for the University and for the College; he had been Vice Chancellor, Regius Professor of Medicine, and a charismatic Master of the College; he was very kind to me and did everything in his power to smooth my path into Downing; nevertheless he was a difficult person to succeed; he had been a professorial fellow in the College before becoming Master so he knew much more about it than I did; he had a remarkable rapport with everyone; I remember when one porter had to go into Addenbrookes for a minor operation, Butterfield visited him the first morning after he was admitted, on the ward round; the nurses were amazed by this visitation to one of the humbler patients; that was typical of him; John was a busy person whose instinct was always to accept invitations so he was over-committed in every way; this did lead to him not doing as much as he should have done in Downing; one of the advantages of my position was that I did not initially have any other commitment, so a full-time Master; that didn't last too long as the Council of the Senate and the Vice Chancellor were aware of my presence, and I became the Vice Chancellor's deputy on several syndicates and committees; that did bring me into the centre of University life, if not in the faculty

17:41:16 There are two major benefactors of Downing, one thanks to Alan Howard and the Cambridge Diet, the other out of the blue, from someone who had not been closely associated with the College; the Cambridge Diet was in many ways a legacy of John Butterfield; he had helped Alan Howard when he was an academic here; Howard had a PhD in Chemistry; while studying he became interested in low calorie intakes in rats and Butterfield suggested that if it also worked in humans he could make a lot of money; Howard turned his attention to low calorie diets for human nutrition; he wrote a little book on the Cambridge Diet and Butterfield wrote a very influential preface with all his authority as Regius Professor of Medicine; Alan did not look back from that point and has always acknowledged his moral debt to the College and Butterfield; I arrived first October 1987 when the Howard Building was erected and waiting to be opened; that derived from the generosity of Alan Howard three or four years before; since then he has been clear about, when mandating money to the College he is also mandating the architect; he would have none other than Quinlan Terry and that has been so for all the other buildings that he funded, including the new Howard Theatre; the sequence began with the Howard Building and continued with the residential building that was the third side of Howard Court, as it is now named; the fourth side is now in completion with the theatre; it is not accidentally named as a theatre - not a lecture theatre in the Cambridge sense, but more like a miniature opera house; again, Quinlan Terry is the architect and Francis, his son, has done quite a lot of the internal murals; Downing has found itself in the position of traditional landed families where they built according to the limit of the mortgage they could raise rather than to the limit of their income; Downing has been able to fund buildings from benefactions but runs the risk of heavy maintenance costs when the benefaction runs out; the other benefaction which was being discussed when I arrived but not secured, was for the library; the College did not have a dedicated library before; the funding came about with initial discussions when Butterfield was Master, but I took them over; that was funding by an alumnus, Joseph Robinson, later Maitland Robinson, who had read history in Downing in the late 1920s; he had fallen in love with the daughter of the person who owned the Hull telephone exchange and company; it was an unique company in the sense that they ran landlines throughout the city area of Hull then leased the apparatus to subscribers; Maitland Robinson wanted to elope but the family were against this, and he should either give up the girl or take both her and the company; he decided to do the latter; the telephone wires were strung from poles and it was suggested post 1945 that the same could be used for a cable television system; he did try to do this, and it would have been thirty to forty years in advance of ITV, but he failed to do so for two reasons; they couldn't get the technology right - the idea was that they would sell the front end of television sets operated from a central broadcasting station; he was also frozen out by the television companies who would get greater profit from selling complete television sets to customers rather than the front end through a powerful commercial intermediary; he then went into the television rental business by default rather than by design; the company was very successful until he sold out to Thorn, and made a great fortune because of that; part of that fortune came to Downing through the Maitland Robinson Library; his second wife, Joanna, became so angry at being confused with David Robinson, also a television magnate who founded Robinson College, changed the family name by deed poll to Maitland Robinson; possibly Maitland was her pre-married name; as part of ‘heritage Downing’ Quinlan Terry was thought the appropriate architect, and I think that the library is his most successful academic building; the College was a little anxious about Quinlan designing the library so, as a condition of the commission, the College required that he act jointly with Harry Faulkner-Brown, an architect who specialized in university libraries; they each acknowledged the professional status of the other so that the technical design was Faulkner-Brown's; it was very specific, requiring natural light on all four sides, that no reader should ever be disturbed by someone collecting a book behind them so the wall of books had to be in a central core - this saved money as it reduced the weight on the perimeter walls; there were also other quite rigid requirements which Quinlan was perfectly happy to accept; it is a library that works very well in a technical sense and is a very handsome structure; Joanna Maitland Robinson has been living in the Channel Islands and comes regularly to Downing

37:49:23 The shock of coming to Cambridge was not only my separation from the faculty, but also because nothing could be of greater collegiate contrast than All Souls and Downing; looking out of my window in All Souls I would see no one but a college servant raking the gravel; in Downing I was in the middle of a hectic undergraduate operation; since then the number of graduate students has grown inordinately and the number of undergraduates, only marginally; it was a pleasant shock because All Souls was really an island in time, more particularly when John Sparrow was Warden; I was welcomed in Downing; in Cambridge, it seemed to me, you either had confrontational or consensus colleges; Christ's at that time was an archetypal confrontational college; Downing, perhaps because it was a small fellowship, was a consensus college, and one had to be careful about upsetting people; there were one or two who had spiky relationships but did not last long in the fellowship after my arrival; the personal relationships have always been very good and such conflicts as there were, were diffused before they could become self-perpetuating; it seemed to me that one of the tasks of the incoming head of college was to get as many people into the Lodge, whether senior or junior members, and to raise the profile of the College; I had quite a handsome entertainment allowance which we spent to the full; I liked entertaining and Ann was very good at it; at that point we had a fellows' butler who knew what the level of expectations were; that had sadly gone by the board now; I was able to hand over to David King with the College in a good state and as a congenial society

44:52:15 The link with Keio University preceded my arrival although I sought to enhance it; it came about partly through John Butterfield, but also through the President of the College, in the Cambridge sense, the senior Fellow, John Treherne; Treherne was a biologist who had discovered a talent for writing and was taken up by P.D. James; she is an Honorary Fellow of the College and has provided funds for a creative writing prize; Treherne had links with Keio and, with Butterfield, Downing established a Keio fellowship so that a senior member of the faculty of Keio would come to Downing every year; Keio funded an apartment in a College building on Lensfield Road, equipped with a Japanese-style kitchen so that Keio fellow's wives would find it familiar for the three months or so that they would stay; I helped to instigate a large summer school for junior members of Keio who come in August with faculty members; Keio, as with most Japanese links, are much more meticulous about maintaining the link and fulfilling all the courtesies and expectations of maintaining such a link than on the Downing side; the portrait of Fukuzawa in Downing was presented to us by Keio with a 10,000 Yen note with his image on it, but the note was subsequently stolen; one of the difficulties is that Keio has a large faculty and, on the whole, every member wants to come to Cambridge for three to six months; there are only thirty-plus active fellows of Downing, very few of whom wanted to spend half a year in Japan; if anyone from Downing is going to Japan for a conference or passing through Japan, then they would probably visit Keio and give a seminar or lecture there; one of the staunch links between Keio and Downing is Toshi Takamiya; another thing which consolidated the link was that a few years ago I was asked to become one of the two international advisors to Keio; that took a lot of time and was fascinating for me; the other advisor was the President of Brown University who then became head of a major foundation, the Carnegie Institute, in the United States, but I don't think he had so much to do with Keio in detail as I did running up to the 150th anniversary celebration

52:51:06 I have tended to accept invitations that have locked up a lot of time; I don't regret this but they have got in the way of publishing large books in retirement; I have done all kinds of things; I was involved in the Jerusalem committee for a time when Teddy Kollek was Mayor, the Wissenschaft Collegium in Berlin, the Central European University in Budapest, and in the early years with Buckingham University; with academic commitments I had a major task where I was the general editor of volume six of 'The History of Humanity' which was organized and published by UNESCO; that was a snake pit and I wish I had never become involved; that was the nineteenth century volume and it became more and more controversial, more particularly with conflicts between ideologies of left and right as one approached the present; a good fifty percent of the authors had actually died before publication at the beginning of 2009; I have also been giving an annual set of lectures in the Institute of Philosophical Studies in Naples; they have wanted to publish them and there are now four little books in print and another on the way, and they are extremely reluctant that I should cease that commitment; I have also been head of the advisory board of the Central European University Press in Budapest; I have been much in favour of George Soros; he has been a genuine philanthropist even though he made a billion pounds when the pound went out of the European payments system in 1992, but what he did was to put every penny of it into supporting liberal causes in central and eastern Europe, including setting up the Central European University; it is an English language press as C.E.U. is registered in the United States, and has been a beacon of light in central Europe; it is a niche publisher, but very successful.
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